The impact of the Together We Shine campaign has begun
With the successful completion of Sidwell Friends’ Together We Shine campaign, faculty and staff have launched the work of two new centers—The Center for Ethical Leadership (CEL) and The Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL). Each center provides an opportunity to reimagine teaching and learning for the future, coalescing existing programs and sparking new ones. Ultimately, the centers will make their home in the newly renovated Upper School.
The Center for Ethical Leadership
Under the purview of our Equity, Justice, and Community team, this new cross-divisional hub will create leadership and civic-engagement opportunities that reimagine the scope of service learning at Sidwell. It will support students as they apply Quaker values and explore moral and ethical questions, helping them find meaningful solutions to improve their School community and engage with communities throughout the DC area and beyond.
As Denise Coffin, kindergarten teacher and Lower School coordinator of the Center for Ethical Leadership, says, “We want students to know that they are citizens, not future citizens—that they will not wait to encounter problems, rather they will go out to find the problems of the world and solve them.”
The CEL team is actively pursuing queries such as: How do we instill a lifelong commitment to serve the common good? How can we instill the resourcefulness, resilience, courage, and skills that ethical leadership requires? How can we provide opportunities to make the study of ethics both academic and experiential? How can we empower students to lead both within and outside of the School community?
Donors have not only made the new CEL possible but have funded specific programs within the center, including the 4th Grade Ethical Leadership program, the Upper School Anindya Dehejia ‘78 Internship program, and the Upper School Sidwell Friends Leadership Academy for scholar athletes.
Alexandra McCoy ’04, Center for Ethical Leadership coordinator, says, “We’re having so many collaborative conversations. Sidwell Friends people talking with community partners — conversations that lead to meaningful action within and around our communities. Seeing students and faculty light up when they come with ideas and questions shows we’re on track, igniting positive impact.”
Seeing students and faculty light up when they come with ideas and questions shows we’re on track, igniting positive impact.”
Alexandra McCoy ‘04
The Center for Teaching and Learning
Cultivating the life of the mind for both our teachers and students is core to the mission of Sidwell Friends. Our teachers constantly strive to improve how they reach students to elicit the best of their intellect, heart, and spirit. The Center for Teaching and Learning supports our faculty’s growth by enabling teachers to explore new ideas in education, pedagogy, and the science of learning.
Under the leadership of Associate Head of School Min Kim, the CTL supports cross-divisional collaboration to inform and transform how we teach. Min says, “The Center for Teaching and Learning offers teachers the chance to delve deeply into their craft, to strengthen knowledge within their own academic disciplines, broaden their understanding of the science of learning, and integrate Quaker practices and social-emotional learning into the classroom. The center creates space for teachers to collaborate, experiment, and explore new ideas that will inform and deepen student learning outcomes.”
The center creates space for teachers to collaborate, experiment, and explore new ideas that will inform and deepen student learning outcomes.”
Associate Head of School Min Kim
Through the CTL, Sidwell has hosted professional development conferences that bring to campus outside experts on topics such as student mental health, Quaker education, and the science of learning. The center also ensures that in-house expertise reaches our entire faculty. In a new faculty seminar series, featured speakers included Endowed Faculty Chair for African and African American Studies Jewell Debnam, Ph.D., whose talk focused on “Black Social Movements, Past and Present” and Supervía Endowed Faculty Chair for Spanish and Latin American Studies Silvana Niazi, Ph.D. on “Why the Histories of the Americas Matter.”
Through the CTL, faculty and staff also have access to numerous professional development grants including employee education grants, conference grants, summer venture curriculum development grants, faculty enrichment travel grants, and sabbaticals.
This past summer alone, individual faculty and teaching teams received 32 curriculum development grants focused in areas as varied as a Lower School Quaker social-emotional curriculum, deepening interdivisional and interdisciplinary efforts in Latin American Studies, and supporting the second year of implementing the new physics-first Upper School science curriculum. Some grants aimed to strengthen practices such as co-teaching, parent-teacher conferences, and student note-taking skills while others developed specific new courses in English and history. Multiple grants also explored different facets of the arts, language, history, and math curricula at Sidwell Friends.
Sidwell Friends’ donors make these grants possible, directly shaping how our faculty teach, collaborate, and influence the learning our students carry with them throughout their lives.